Manas Kumar, Thinking out Loud

For most readers of this blog, you already know the importance of making your marketing campaigns viral.

The real question is how do you make your campaigns viral in such a way that your message starst spreading like wildfire.

Well, here is a solution recipe that talks about how to create a viral email marketing campaign with guaranteed results.

Ingredients:

• A great special offer
• A competition give away
• List of opt-in email subscriobers (with first names)
• A Maxmail user account (get a Free trial account here)

Preperation:

Make sure your mailing list of subscribers is clean and has first names recorded for every single subscriber along with a valid email address.

Create an HTML newsletter (doesnt have to be fancy – keep it simple) with your special offer inside. The body of the newsletter should have a 600 x 200 graphic (well designed) that talks about an automatic entry for anyone who forwards this email to a friend. Each forward counts for one entry.

Mention the giveaway prize.

Forward this email to your friends to automatically into a draw to win one of 5 42inch Panasonic PLasma TVs. Forward as many times as you like, each forward counts for one entry. Increase your chances, get forwarding now.

Make sure you have the subscribers first name in the subject line (for higher uptake) and also in the greeting line (e.g. Hello John instead of Hi there)

Send the email.

Watch it cook

John receives your email and decides to forward the email to Sally, Bod, Sue and Ryan. Because John opted Sally, Bob, Sue and Ryan into your original mailing list, when any one of them forward this email, you have an exponential growth in the virality of your email.

Consider this

How Viral Marketing Works

You sent an email to John and it has been forwarded around to (in this example) a total of 29 new subscribers. You have also accumulated several competition entries. Your mailing list has grown and now you have greater interest from your customers.

Best of all, Maxmail’s viral marketing feature allowed you to tap into a list of subscribers that you didnt have access to prior to sending this email.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

One of the best ways to build your mailing list is by collecting referrals.

With Maxmail, when you send out a newsletter, you can include an HTML hyperlink anywhere inside the Newsletter by adding the #ForwardMail# tag. When the newsletter is sent to your subscribers, they will be able to click on the #ForwardMail# link (you can control the text label) and come to a landing page that looks like the one below.

At this stage your subscribers can forward the newsletter to their friends and also opt them into your mailing list for future mail outs.

Take a look at the following video tutorial to see how the entire process works out.

Maxmail

Does anyone has anything to say about the lack of Email standards with rendering of HTML emails across different mail clients?

I find it particularly frustrating trying to integrate an HTML email that is cross-mail client compatible.

So we have decided to build this new live Acid Test tool which will check for compliance across the following mail clients per HTML email.

Apple Mail
Eudora
Entourage
Outlook 2007
Gmail
Lotus Notes 08
Yahoo Mail
MSN Web Mail
Windows Live Mail
Mozilla thunderbird

The Acid test works along side the newsletter creation tool/HTML Editor which will process the HTML syntax of an email, check across 17 CSS properties that are partially/not supported across some of the mail clients and show the user a score for each mail client.

Have a look at this video tutorial to see how Maxmail provides you with a robust solution to combat the increasingly frustrating job of making sure your HTML emails look the same across every mail client.

We would love to hear your comments or suggestions regardnig an ACID Test of HTML emails – Help us improve it.

Maxmail Acid Test Demo